Making up a moral panic then using it to justify your bizarre prejudices: here.
New Labour’s horrible, horrible illiberalism explained by a sympathiser: here (a sensible person adds: "this shit about redefining what it means to be British is now just standard political waffle. No-one has made any decent attempt at it. I think that an important part of being British is probably not worrying all the time about what it means to be British")
What we’re fighting for: here. Are the Allied Forces in Iraq as bad as the Resistance [*] yet? If not, what exact criteria should we be using to judge? ‘Killing civilians’ and ‘kidnapping and torturing innocents’ seem to be flawed ones…
[*] Very bad and evil, notwithstanding their Resisting A Bad Bunch Of Occupying Bastards credentials. I suspect they still play a marginally greater role than us in making day-to-day life shit for Iraqis, although they wouldn’t have had the chance but for our Glorious Liberation.
If the Blairite toady who wrote that Times editorial means it "Watchwords for the parliament should be: tough on disrespect, tough on the causes of disrespect."
then part 2 means they’re going to stop killing anl lying. Hooray.
what’s the source for that "violent crime, usually drink-fuelled, has quadrupled"? number in the Times piece, anyone? I don’t think it has.
Is it just me, or do people who go on about "respect" sound kind of like wannabe rappers? If they said "courtesy" or "not acting like a dickhead", they would get the point across better, but then I wouldn’t be amused, so hey.
Not sure, but the most recent BCS notes,
Analysis by the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) has found that police recorded violence against the person increased by 8.6 per cent overall in 2004/05 compared with 2003/04. This increase was largely made up of a rise in low-level and alcohol-related violent crime, and over half of the increase was due to proactive policing (MPS, 2005).
My guess is that this is the normal confusion between amount of crime and amount of crime reported. Since the change in reporting rules the number of "less serious" violent crimes recorded has gone from ~200,000/year to ~1,000,000/year (figure 5.2 in the PDF above), so it wouldn’t be at all difficult for somebody a bit dim or with an axe to grind to infer that the total number of "drink-fuelled" assaults has risen by a similar factor.
You’re forgetting, the main cause of this massive jump is the way that police officers record crimes, they now hand out crime numbers willy nilly, what would have been in the past considered one assault will probably generate at least three different crime numbers today.
1/ Crime has been going down ever sinve Roy Jenkins was Home Secretary.
2/ The police inflate the figures to justify increased resources and more repressive powers.
3/ they’re aided in this by dishonest tabloid campaigns from the Sun and Mail (who supported Mosley’s Blackshirts in the 30s)
4/ people report crimes nowadays which they’d have accepted in the past, because they have more phones and more insurance
5/ especially domestic violence, child abuse and homophobic hate crime, which were an everyday psrt of life in the so-called ‘Golden Age’ (that never was) of the 1950s
6/ anyway, if crime has gone up, it’s because of inequality
7/ and Thatcher saying ‘there’s no such thing as society’
8/ and anyway, it’s good that the dispossessed re-appropriate goods from the better off
Yrs
Laban Tall
Stanley Cohen Professor of Moral Panic
University of South-West Scotland (formerly Annan Working Men’s Club)
hmmm nice straw man you got there. the facts are
1. Crime has gone down since 1995, largely for economic and demographic reasons
2. The police have reorganised their reporting systems a couple of times to do their job better, and these reorganisations have had the effect of increasing the reported crime statistics.
3. It is hard to say how worthwhile these reorganisations have been, but the fact that crime has, in fact, fallen, means that they can’t exactly have been disastrous.
4. Ever since the Romans, dull social-conservative farts have been saying that society is going to hell whether it has been or not.
5. And they shouldn’t expect to be taken seriously if they ignore the facts.
Good to see banal is as incisive and witty as ever
You see ? It IS possible to make a valid point without swearing. Didn’t hurt, did it ?
PS – bollocks – I forgot the ‘people have been complaining about society going downhill since the Ancient Greeks, therefore at no time have any of these complaints ever had any validity’. Thanks d2 for joining the dots.
"’people have been complaining about society going downhill since the Ancient Greeks, therefore …"
Good gracious "Laban" how on earth are we to take your live-action crime reports seriously if you pretend that this : – " they shouldn’t expect to be taken seriously if they ignore the facts"
is actually this : – "at no time have any of these complaints ever had any validity"
I mean, even *I* can see it.
I said:
"Ever since the Romans, dull social-conservative farts have been saying that society is going to hell whether it has been or not"
you summarised it as
"have been complaining about society going downhill since the Ancient Greeks, therefore at no time have any of these complaints ever had any validity’"
since we’re playing that game, I will summarise your
"Thanks d2 for joining the dots"
as
"I’ve just farted".